Green Room

E.M. Zanotti: So rest in peace, Judge Bork. And thanks for everything.

Our friend E.M. knew Judge Bork well, as a law professor, an entertaining storyteller, and an all-around impressive man. Read the whole thing for a glimpse beyond the legal life of Bork:

One thing about Robert Bork, though, was how much he loved his place at the crossroads of history. I might have dozed off once or twice during his lectures on the bastardization of the the concept of privacy as it was wrongly enshrined in the Constitution’s penumbras and emanations (so, at least I paid a little attention), but never during his incredibly witty and detailed accounts of things like the Saturday Night Massacre, which he retold to myself and a few others after we sneaked a bottle of wine from another law school party to his office. Bork had been an unwilling participant – called to fire Archibald Cox as Solicitor General and acting head of the Justice Department in the middle of the night after the heads of the first two Attorneys General had rolled – and he talked about the anguish he felt as he discussed what he’d been called by the President to do with his then wife, Claire. He told the story to each successive class, I understand, on their final day of Moral Foundations of the Law, probably as a reward for listening politely to the thoughts of a real genius, and for having our inflated egos brushed aide by a man who really knew what he was talking about.